Digital texts and digital libraries offer us new opportunities for searching and accessing literary material. But more interesting and exciting than the mere searching of digital texts is the ability to leverage computation in order to process and analyze textual data, to provide new methods for reading, analyzing, and understanding literature.

This course provides an introduction to the field of humanities computing with a special emphasis on literary text-analysis. Students learn about the preparation and processing of digital texts while exploring literary methods which help us explain and interpret literary texts, genres, and movements. The course includes units dealing with "stylometry" (computer based stylistic analysis), authorship attribution, gender detection, text encoding, and the visualization of literary information using such open source tools as R and Gephi.

Throughout the course we consider the theoretical issues associated with employing quantitative methodologies in a traditionally qualitative discipline; we read and discuss landmark essays in the field; and we end with an informed discussion of how digital libraries and computation are taking literary scholarship "beyond the book." Students will develop basic coding skills in an environment in which understanding literature is the only prerequisite. No programming experience is required; students will develop fluency in XML and R through exercises and work on a collaborative text-analysis project.

Humanities students often do not realize (or even imagine) that 1) they are capable of learning to write useful and practical computer programs within the course of a semester even if they have no prior background in programming; 2) the ability to write one’s own programs can be valuable for scholars in the humanities, especially because commercial software often does not address research needs in the humanities; and 3) practical computer programming, no less than reading, writing, and arithmetic, is a useful skill that is within the reach of any educated person regardless of academic specialization.

This course will introduce students to the role that computational methods can play in primary research and scholarship in the humanities, using as a technological framework eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and related technologies.

This course gives you an opportunity to combine the hands-on production of multimodal scholarly communications with critical approaches to literature, new media, and digital culture. Here, by “multimodal,” I mean a material communication that demands more than one form of perception (e.g., distant reading, casual listening, scanning, or close watching) through more than one medium (e.g., audio, electronic text, image, video, or a database). With this definition in mind, throughout the term we will ask how creating knowledge through algorithms, networked environments, graphical expressions, and dynamic texts influences the theory and practice of literary studies. In so doing, we will intertwine three primary threads in digital literary studies (DLS): (1) the legacies of electronic literature (where DLS implies studying literature that is “digital-born”), (2) computational approaches to literary criticism (where DLS implies using digital technologies to interpret literature and/or compose scholarly communications), and (3) critical frameworks for computational culture (where DLS implies examining the recursive relationships between digital technologies and cultural assumptions, practices, and formations).

Optional readings for Robert Wilensky's CS 294-3: Distributed Information Management course at UC Berkeley.

Readings for Robert Wilensky's CS 294-3: Distributed Information Management course at UC Berkeley.

Lecture notes for Robert Wilensky's CS 294-3: Distributed Information Management course at UC Berkeley.

The purpose of this course is to examine ongoing research issues related to digital documents. As suggested by the title, major themes include information representation, information presentation, information linking, and information interoperation. Implicit in these issues are also issue of collaborative use of information, i.e., how networks of information using users can be greater than the same of their parts.

The goal of the course is to lay the foundation for further evolution of networked digital document systems. The ideal student is one with lots of initiative, who enjoys learning together with students from different disciplines, and is excited by the prospect of identifying the important questions to ask, and by the opportunity to shape the directions of an incipient technology.

The course will cover some fundamental technologies, but also examine ongoing (and continually evolving) attempts to bring such technologies into common use. The course will comprise weekly readings, lectures followed by discussion of papers and issues, and occasional guest lectures. Students will work on assignments and a course project, which they will report on in class toward the end of the semester.

Ideally, student projects will advance the state of the art of "network-centric" digital documents.

his courses focuses on understanding the Web as an information system, and how to use it for information management for personal and shared information. The Web is an open and constantly evolving system which can make it hard to understand how the different parts of the landscape fit together. This course provides students with an overview of the Web as a whole, and how the individual parts it together. We briefly look at topics such as Web design and Web programming, but this course is not exclusively designed to teach HTML or JavaScript. Instead, we look at the bigger picture and how and when to use these and other technologies. The Web already is and will remain a central part in many information-related activities for a long time to come, and this course provides students with the understanding and skills to better navigate and use the landscape of Web information, Web technologies, Web tools, and common Web patterns.

It is now almost two decades since the Web has been invented. Initially motivated by the need to exchange documents between computer systems, the Web evolved rapidly, reshaped the notion of information systems, and changed our social interactions and cultural development. Decentralization and openness were fundamental design principles in the Web Architecture and enabled the creation of large, community-driven information spaces such as Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap. In recent years, people and organizations began to adopt these architectural principles for publishing data on the Web, resulting in efforts such as Open Government Data or Linked Data.
This course will examine technologies for building data-centric information systems on the World Wide Web, discuss the social and policy context from which they arose, show the practical applications of such systems, and go into cross-cutting issues in this context. Course work involves lectures and readings, and weekly homework assignments. In addition, there will be a semester-long project in which the students should demonstrate their expertise in building data-centric Web information systems.

The fundamental motivation for this course is that anyone responsible for digital collections will have to understand and be conversant in various aspects of the associated information technologies, in order to evaluate the work of developers, delegate tasks, write appropriate requests for proposals (RFPs), and establish reasonable management and preservation policies.

Survey of classificatory principles from bibliographic, philosophical, biological, psychological, and linguistic perspectives. Challenges to traditional principles from the cognitive sciences and their implementations for bibliographic classification.

Collection of DH syllabi from Dan Cohen's syllabus dump.

The course will synthesize recent research in linguistics, computer science, and natural language processing with the aim of introducing students to theoretical and computational models of language. The course will familiarize students with a wide range of linguistic phenomena with the aim of appreciating the complexity, but also the systematic behaviour of natural languages like English, the pervasiveness of ambiguity, and how this presents challenges in natural language processing. In addition, the course introduce the most important algorithms and data structures that are commonly used to solve many NLP problems.

This course will be a project-based, studio-style exercise in designing a resource collection. We’ll concentrate on the conceptual aspects of design as opposed to technical implementations: figuring out a purpose and audience for the collection, selecting resources, describing and organizing the resources, and determining how to present those resources to users. While the ideas we engage and the skills we will learn should be applicable to any sort of collection, our design environment for this course will focus on digital media collections (primarily videos) made available online as a type of digital library. Our design practice will be grounded in the idea that a collection is itself a type of document and not merely a container for documents. With this theoretical committment comes a number of fundamental questions, which we will engage throughout the semester as we proceed with our project work.

The notion of “primitives” as the “finite list of self-understood terms” from which, without recourse to further definitions or explanations, axiomatic logic may proceed, has (as you probably know) run into some difficulty in philosophy and mathematics, especially in the 20th century, but it’s not my purpose here to sort that out—I’m using the term “primitives” in a self-consciously analogical way, to refer to some basic functions common to scholarly activity across disciplines, over time, and independent of theoretical orientation.  These “self-understood” functions form the basis for higher-level scholarly projects, arguments, statements, interpretations—in terms of our original, mathematical/philosophical analogy, axioms.

Creative and compelling theoretical formulations of the archive have emerged from a host of disciplines in the last decade. Derrida and Foucault, as well as many other humanists and social scientists, have initiated a broadly interdisciplinary conversation about the nature of the archive. This literature suggests a confluence of interests among scholars, archivists, and librarians that is fueled by a shared preoccupation with the function and fate of the historical and scholarly record. The following essay provides an exploration and overview of this archival discourse.

This web site is designed to be a starting place, an entryway for scholars interested in beginning to explore the possibilities for digital tools, programs, and methods to empower and enhance their scholarship in the humanities. These essays and links are only a brief glimpse into the vast field of potential in the digital humanities, but we hope that they point outward to the field’s many possibilities.

Welcome to ENG 798.001/ENG 583.001, Introduction to Digital Humanities. This course will introduce you to the digital humanities (DH), a multi-disciplinary, international field comprising academic researchers, librarians, archivists, museum professionals, technologists, artists, designers, and professionals working in both the government and private sectors.

An informal monthly gathering to discuss issues related to the digital humanities.

Lev Manovich's Spring 2011 Digital Humanities course at UCSD.

A brief selection of DH-related syllabi.

Alex's digital humanities / digital scholarship syllabi.

We have traditionally analyzed collections of information or things using categories like libraries, museums, archives, content or knowledge management systems, and data repositories. The concept of an organizing system complements this categorical view with a dimensional perspective that sees these categories as sets of design patterns that reflect typical answers to questions about what is being organized, why, when, how much, who is doing the organizing, and how services are provided to interact with the organizing system. These dimensions frame trade-offs and constraints about the content, policies, and implementation of organizing systems. The primary goal of this course is to use these design dimensions to better understand traditional design patterns and their consequences, and to identify useful new ones.

For example, the thingness, uniqueness, persistence, useful lifetime, mashability, and intended uses and users of the content of an organizing system jointly determine how it is implemented and operated. We will examine how these design influences intersect, and consider what alternative designs would look like if some of these content and policy choices were to change. Furthermore, in many domains the Web has become the default implementation of organizing systems interfaces, yet we don't critically examine the implications this should have on the system itself. So we will study how Web Architecture — or the architectures and constraints implied by other metamodels and architectures such as Linked Data or WS-* services — influence decisions about content granularity and structure, how identity and provenance are supported, the kinds of interactions and services the organizing system allows, and so on.

Exploring Disciplines is an exciting one-semester course that introduces PhD students to practical strategies for interdisciplinary research. It enables them responsibly and efficiently to undertake explorations into fields other than their own and so to pursue their dissertation research much more effectively. Its focus is on doing interdisciplinarity rather than theorizing it. Nevertheless the course proceeds by questioning disciplines for their explicit and implicit theoretical presuppositions and at each step reflects on how an outsider may understand a discipline in its own terms.

Exploring Disciplines is based on the idea that academic disciplines are “epistemic cultures” that can be negotiated in much the same way as social anthropologists have negotiated other human cultures. After some consideration of disciplinarity, basic principles of ethnography and gross differences among the major disciplinary groups, it considers seven epistemic cultures as case-studies. For each, core texts from those cultures are discussed.

The primary goal of this class is to teach students about the culture of "print media" in an era when that culture is being joined (and in some cases, overtaken) by a culture that we might variously call digital culture, online culture, or the culture of the web.

Because of the recent, shared emphasis in many fields on digital methods, scholars in the humanities, arts, social sciences, and sciences increasingly need to collaborate across disciplines. This course reflects theoretically and practically on the new digitally facilitated interdisciplinarity by asking students to choose a literary work and treat it according to one or more of the research paradigms prevalent in other fields of study.

This class deals with ways people have developed for telling others what they think they know, what their research or investigation has revealed to them about society, social life, and social problems. It thus has to do with problems of what has been call